Of Cats and Raisins
by AlienZombies
Summary: Soon, they won't have any time left. Nick focuses on the simpler pleasures of life, gets in what he can. NICKXELLIS


Just something short and sweet I came up with while playing the boys on The Sims. Yes, I made Nick and Ellis Sims. Don't judge me.

**Of Cats and Raisins**

Nick was settling down on the couch with a bowl of raisins when Ellis shuffled into the room.

"Hey," Ellis said. "Have you seen the cat?"

Rolling his eyes, Nick muttered, "No. I can't see a damn thing ever since _someone_ lost my glasses."

"What was that?"

"I said, you're deaf! You old geezer."

"Hey, watch who you're callin' a geezer. You still got more'n ten years on me!" But Ellis was smiling. He came to sit beside Nick, snuggling up to him shamelessly as he had done from the start of this forty-year roller coaster of hell and triumph.

Sometimes Nick lay awake and wondered how they had made it from that, the late-night rounds of sex or fighting or, God forbid, that awful screaming place they still had to watch out for, the ghosts of what had happened to them, in which Ellis always dreamed of blood raining from the sky and Nick dreamed of the low, constant weeping of a Witch as the storm came closer and closer, and the clouds were made of a thousand screaming, dying faces, mottled with decay… Nick wondered, now, how they had ever made it through, to this, now, this quiet retirement that consisted of watching television and eating raisins and petting the cat. They had no children – Nick wouldn't put up with them, and Ellis adapted well to this rule by adopting Rudolph, and then Queenie, and finally Spock. "Cats," Ellis had said once, "have a real short expiration date."

They were both acutely aware of the number of years that had passed, how much older Nick was than Ellis – his expiration date was coming up soon, maybe in the next year, maybe in the next twenty years. But he was over seventy now, and while the life expectancy of men had shot up to eighty-one over the years, that was still an awful short frame of time. Ellis had cried before over the thought of losing him, being so much younger – he could have a decade or more of solitude if Nick knocked off too soon. But it was an unspoken horror that they didn't bring up, choosing instead to enjoy what little time they did have. Honestly, Nick expected to be sick of Ellis after each day with him as company, but he only seemed to grow fonder.

"Why do you always keep this damn place so cold?" Ellis asked now. He snatched the remote from Nick's hand and started flipping channels.

"I was watching that," Nick complained halfheartedly.

Ellis started stealing his raisins. His teeth were beginning to go bad, though at sixty-four, he still had a way to go before they started falling out.

"Don't know how I ever put up with you," Nick said now. He gave up his raisins altogether, and Ellis, grinning in triumph, ate them all. "Christ. Forty years already."

"I'm just cause my ass is so damn adorable," Ellis declared, and, seeing the wrinkles in Nick's forehead deepen in false irritation, he laughed. "Well, that's what you said."

"Man, that was like thirty years ago."

"Well, it stuck with me. Is all I'm sayin'." Ellis's cheeks turned a bit pink. In Nick's honest opinion, Ellis's ass, no matter how pale and saggy and freckled, was still pretty damn adorable, and this was a sign of just how senile he was getting.

Nick pretended not to remember, but he did – that night, when Ellis came home beaten and bloody. Some kids had caught up to him and given him what-for. And when Nick had tried to help him, Ellis had screamed at him and hit him, and Ellis never hit anybody like that, and once he had done it he was painfully sorry and had cried and cried. Nick had held him and kissed him and murmured into his hair something about only putting up with him because he had a cute ass, which made Ellis laugh around the tears until they were both tender but healed, like a freshly-stitched wound. They had only been married for about three years – it had taken a long time, and a lot of campaigning on Ellis's part to even get Nick to consider. They had been as good as married before that, anyway, which was why they counted it as forty years rather than the thirty-two it actually was.

Presently, Ellis changed the subject, settling on the Discovery Channel. "Is we goin' to France like you promised, still, or did you go on and change your mind again?"

"I already bought the tickets, I said. We're going."

"Well, just cause you said we was goin' to Hawaii that one time and then we didn't go."

"What, five years ago? That was because the house burned down."

"Shit, I know," Ellis mumbled, embarrassed. "Was it really so long?"

"It was." Nick smiled gently. "Don't you remember? It was the year Jimmy Gibbs died."

"Don't you go 'round mentioning that," Ellis said. His face fell. "Shit, I still get all sad bout it."

"Sorry, El." Apologies for Nick were becoming easier, finally – probably because he was just too damn lazy to champion his rightness all of the time.

Sighing, Ellis rested his head on Nick's shoulder and rubbed his hands. "It's cold in here. Why don't you ever turn up the heat?"

"I forget. I'm not cold."

"Well, it's botherin' my arthritis."

"Do you want me to fix it?"

"I'll be fine if you stay here and keep me warm."

"I think this is a ploy." Nick grinned. "This is all just a brilliant plan to keep me as your space heater."

"Quit squirmin' and let me…" And just like that, Ellis was in Nick's lap, snuggled against his chest like a toddler. Nick laughed and put his face in that soft, scruffy white hair.

"You're getting too fat to do this, man," Nick gasped, and in a way it was kind of true. Ellis had started filling out around fifty, around his gut and thighs, while Nick stayed quite thin – though, recently, he had taken on a nearly emaciated look, as some old folks tend to do.

"You quit teasin' me," Ellis murmured against Nick's neck, kissing it; the scruff of his unshaven chin filled Nick's blood with heat, and his groin pulsed a little with interest, but he was content, for now, to just cuddle there on their well-loved couch that had seen many fights and reunions. Plus, the last time they had tried what Ellis fondly deemed "Manly wild couchsex" Nick's back had screamed at him for a week, and Ellis was sore from head to toe. Since then, they had declared the activity more painful than rewarding, and had settled not to do it again.

They watched some dolphins or whales or something on the television. Ellis drifted off for a little while and then came back. He looked up at Nick with gentle eyes that were starting to go blue around the edges for some reason, and Nick kissed the place where his nose met the space between them. This made Ellis giggle.

"I had a dream," Ellis said. "I was rememberin' bout, you know…"

They didn't talk about it outright, that time, the time that Nick inwardly called The Fucking End, when there had been something akin to a zombie apocalypse.

"Yeah?"

"And there was Keith, and there was you, and you was both getting' torn to shreds, and I didn't have no gun."

"Ellis…"

"Naw, I don't know. It was a real bad dream, that's all."

"Sorry, babe. I didn't know."

"It was a real quiet-like scary dream. Guess I didn't spaz much." Ellis frowned thoughtfully. "Did I ever tell you 'bout that time me and Keith made homemade bumper cars out of ridin' lawn mowers?"

"No," Nick lied, to humor him. Sometimes Ellis's memory failed him, and while his forgetfulness had always been subtly present, it was becoming more and more pronounced. He would get upset if you brought it up, and it did nobody any good in the end, so Nick sat back and listened to the story again.

Ellis still talked about Keith, though they had never found a trace of him since the apocalypse. They had visited his house (and he did exist – there were photographs everywhere, taken by Ellis's friend Jeremiah who had died of the Infection), and spoken with his sister-in-law. Ellis had cried one time, in that sensitive space between their unspoken agreement to live together and their unspoken agreement to be each other's lovers, standing in the kitchen and cutting up a tomato, he had just let the tears start flowing, and Nick hadn't known what to do, because they both knew what had happened to Keith DuBois, but they would never be sure. Two weeks after that day, after Ellis had sobbed until he made himself nearly sick, they had kissed for the first time over dinner for no particular reason at all other than that it was the right time for them to do it.

"What're you thinkin' bout?" Ellis asked fondly, sweeping his thumb across the broad angle of Nick's cheekbone.

"Hmm?"

"I said, what're you think' bout?"

"You," Nick said, a more or less honest answer, which earned him a radiant smile.

"What 'bout me?"

"About how you steal all my raisins all the damn time, and change the channel when I'm watching game shows."

"Naw," Ellis said, scandalized, making Nick laugh.

"No. I'm kidding."

"Some great fuckin' husband you are. Makin' fun of me all the time."

"Yet here we still are. Going to France tomorrow."

Ellis scrunched up his nose in that adorable way he did. "What'd you say?"

Nick raised his voice obligingly. "I said, we're going to France tomorrow."

"I ain't leavin' til I seen the Eiffel Tower."

"Well, duh. That's the first thing we're doing, little idiot." Nick pinched his ear playfully, making Ellis yowl and sulk.

In a way, they hadn't changed at all after all of those years. They still pulled each other's pigtails and bickered, but there was that softer, underlying tenderness that made Nick warm with contentment, and made Ellis patient with him.

"Are we gonna eat snails when we go?" Ellis asked Nick presently.

"I guess," Nick answered. "Anything you want to do, Overalls."

The nickname did its job. Ellis kissed him soundly and tugged on what was left of Nick's hair. It wasn't fair that Ellis still had a full head of hair, while Nick's hairline had started receding almost the minute the apocalypse was over.

"Quit tryin' to butter me up," Ellis murmured into Nick's mouth, kissing him again and again, softer and softer each time.

Nick chuckled. "How we ever got stuck together, I'll never know."

Ellis raised an eyebrow, a trick he had learned from Nick himself, and spoke with a casual smirk. "There was a certain man, I think I remember, who was all like, 'when this thing is over with, I guess I'll be by my damn self' and another certain man, I think, who wasn't gonna let that shit happen in a million freezin' years in hell, and who invited the other man over to his house like a gentleman, and then bought him a bunch of things so that the other man couldn't damn well leave without payin' him back, and then took him when he had his guard down and fucked him so hard and often the other man damn near forgot he was from Georgia and ought to be gettin' back, and so here he stayed. I think that's how the story went, anyway."

Nick was deeply amused, and struggled to school his expression into one of cool interest. "That so?"

"Sounds 'bout right. Yep, I think that's how it went. Yep, sounds 'bout right."

"That it does." Nick nipped at Ellis's lip, and Ellis scolded him for getting frisky, even as he reciprocated. If there was one thing that had really held up, it was that – despite Nick's bad back and Ellis's arthritis and knees.

Nick was going in for the kill ("how 'bout a tussle, cowboy?" which always made Ellis cackle with delight) when something brown and fuzzy bounced off of his head with explosive force.

"Ouch! Holy shit!"

"Spock!" Ellis squealed, and held out his hands for the cat, who obediently bounded into his lap. "Well, hello, purty kitty! I was lookin' for you!"

Spock, their most recent cat, purred and rubbed against Ellis's hand. He adored the smaller man to death, but was downright sadistic when it came to Nick.

"Mood-killing pussy," Nick said to the cat.

The cat ignored him. He knew who had the upper hand in this household.

"I don't even think I took my vitamins this morning," Nick complained. "I can't deal with this."

"Quit bein' all jealous," Ellis teased, snuggling the cat now. "You'll have me to yourself for the next week."

"Damn straight I will. You're not bringing the cat to Paris."

"Could I?"

"No."

Ellis scowled. "You ain't no fun. Crotchety old bastard," he said without any real venom. He kissed the top of Spock's furry head. "But Christ do I love you."

"Uh huh."

"I do." Ellis leaned back and settled in to nap, Spock cradled in his arms. "Don't I, pussycat?"

The cat didn't give a damn. He switched his tail back and forth.

Nick was craving raisins.

-- **the end**


End file.
